


take note

by nicole_writes



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Annette Rarepair Week, F/F, Fire Emblem Magic, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Golden Deer Annette Fantine Dominic, Introspection, Let them be Soft, Mage Girlfriends, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Studying, let them be girlfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:00:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29232669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicole_writes/pseuds/nicole_writes
Summary: Lysithea smells like ink and parchment and the faintest bit like the lavender tea cakes that they had shared mid-afternoon, Annette decides.Her hair, white with just the tiniest undertone of violet, is spilled across her shoulders, unrestrained and half-frizzy.  A few strands of it flap in front of her face whenever Lysithea exhales particularly deeply.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Lysithea von Ordelia
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29





	take note

**Author's Note:**

> mage girlfriends.... I love them....
> 
> today fits the free day prompt for [Annette Rarepair Week](https://twitter.com/annetterprwk).
> 
> if you like this feel free to check out my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nicolewrites37) and talk to me about them because i just think they deserve to be soft....

Lysithea smells like ink and parchment and the faintest bit like the lavender tea cakes that they had shared mid-afternoon, Annette decides. 

Her hair, white with just the tiniest undertone of violet, is spilled across her shoulders, unrestrained and half-frizzy. A few strands of it flap in front of her face whenever Lysithea exhales particularly deeply. 

Lying across the library table as she is can’t be particularly comfortable, but Annette doesn’t have the heart to wake her. They’ve been working up here for _hours_. Their only breaks were when they were bothered by other people: first Claude, who came to loudly insist that their eyes would go cross-eyed if they kept reading and then Hilda, who came bearing a tray of tea cakes and an unmatched determination to gossip. 

Annette herself had been feeling rather sleepy as she poured over the next volume of incantations, but Lysithea had been the one to fall asleep first—quite suddenly too, as she had simply sighed and slumped in her seat, nearly banging her head against the wooden surface of their shared table. 

Annette cups her chin with one hand and watches her friend sleep. From this angle, most of Lysithea’s hair is covering her face, but Annette can just barely see the curve of her nose, the arch of her cheek and the dark shadow where her lips would be. For once, Lysithea looks peaceful, as if she’s no longer being forced to carry the weight of the world on her back. 

Annette is afraid to move away from the table or to rearrange any of the books. She fears she might send a stack toppling to the ground with a loud thud, something which would undoubtedly wake Lysithea. It would just be such a grand shame to wake her from what seems to be a perfectly reasonable nap in a perfectly unreasonable place. 

It’s tempting to try and rest her head on her own arms and steal a few winks of sleep, but she knows that if she does it’s likely that neither of them will wake before morning and then they’ll both have the most profoundly horrible kinks in their necks. At least, if Annette stays awake, she can let Lysithea doze for a little before eventually rousing her so that they both can go to their beds like normal people. 

Still, she finds herself wanting to draw out this moment. 

It’s a strange feeling. A sleeping Lysithea isn’t exactly what one might call good company. Many people, Annette knows, would go as far as to say that even an awake Lysithea isn’t good company. Annette disagrees wholeheartedly. 

Lysithea can be pushy, sure, but she’s absolutely brilliant. She’s also determined and motivated and more passionate than most people could dream of being. Annette admires her. 

She might be a little older than the Leicester native, but, more often than not, she seems to see herself as chasing in Lysithea’s footsteps. Whether that’s in Reason or in Faith or even sometimes in Authority. The respect that Lysithea commands from her battalion is something Annette aspires to gain herself. 

But, for all the good she sees in Lysithea, Annette knows that she hardly ever sees the other woman take a break. She’s always going and talking and reading and practicing magic. It’s like she never has time for a break. Annette is afraid she’s going to burn out. 

After one or two tea and sweets-fuelled all-nighters during the Officer’s Academy, Mercedes had managed to scold Annette into better sleeping and study habits, but it seems like Lysithea hasn’t had the pleasure of someone doing that for her. It would be, at this point, entirely too hypocritical for Annette to be the one to attempt to do so since Annette is also the one who had pushed them to get through one more tome tonight.

Annette lifts her head a bit, freeing her hand, and slowly smooths her hand against the page of the book in front of her. Her eyes drift down too, away from Lysithea, but the words on the page are fuzzy. Not fuzzy in the tired-eyes-can’t-read type of way, but rather that the strings of words she is trying to process don’t seem to be in any logical order. 

Plus, the thrumming of her heart in her ears is distracting enough on its own. 

She picks up her quill, dipping it into her inkwell and dotting the excess off the nib before pressing it against her notes page. Instead of a sentence—or even a word, honestly—Annette ends up creating a black dot that swells the longer that the quill remains pressed against the page. 

With a sigh, she lifts it and places it to the side. She isn’t going to be able to do anything else useful tonight and the urge to crawl into her own bed and sleep for an entire day is getting stronger. She doesn’t have Mercedes to regulate her anymore, but she can imagine the lecture that the Professor will give both her and Lysithea if they show up to _yet another_ war meeting on not enough sleep. 

Annette packs up her things slowly and carefully. She lifts and places books and papers and notes like they are made of glass. She manages not to upset any of the precariously stacked reference books or even bump her knees against the bottom of the table. She even manages to pack up most of Lysithea’s things in addition to her own, but whatever light sleeping spell had washed over Lysithea seems to wear off as Annette is leaning in to put away the other girl’s quill. 

Lysithea’s head snaps up rather suddenly and it’s only a narrow margin that saves them from smashing their head together. Annette leans back quickly, snapping her hands back to her lap, but manages to bang the table as she does so. The book stack nearest to the edge of the table quivers—once, twice, three times—before gravity takes over and the top four books go crashing over the edge with a loud thunk. 

Lysithea jolts, hastily brushing aside her hair to clear her face, and Annette freezes, staring between the fallen books and her newly awoken friend. She winces. 

“Sorry.”

Upon seeing that the cause of the loud noise was just falling books, Lysithea’s shoulders round with exhaustion as her tension visibly ebbs away. Annette watches as the other woman sighs more heavily, reaching up to twist her heavy white hair back from her face and pin her veil back into place. 

Lysithea scrubs at her face, rubbing under her eye with the hem of her dress’s sleeve. Without thinking, Annette reaches out and lightly lays her hand atop Lysithea’s other hand. They both stop, pausing to look down at where Annette’s slightly smaller hand is just barely resting atop Lysithea’s outstretched fingers. 

“You didn’t wake me,” Lysithea notes quietly. “We could have kept working.”

Annette shakes her head, not moving her hand. “If you fell asleep on your work, it means you were too tired to be doing good work.”

“And bad work isn’t work worth doing,” Lysithea mumbles. 

Almost in slow motion, her hand turns over so that Annette’s fingertips are just grazing the centre of her palm. The fading green-black bruises along Annette’s fingers are stark in contrast to the fair tone of Lysithea’s skin. Lysithea’s own fingertips are mottled with black and purple bruises from her Dark Magic, but that scarring stretches down through her veins into her wrists. Dark Magic is more damaging than Black Magic. 

Annette slides her hand forward until she touches the very sensitive skin on the inside of Lysithea’s wrist where one of the normally blue-green veins is an odd purplish colour. “You looked peaceful,” she says next. “I didn’t want to disturb that.”

Her gaze holds Lysithea’s for a moment and her smile slips a fraction. She’s suddenly nervous. 

Selfconscious and too aware all at once, Annette looks down at the table and the still not-packed remains of their difficult workday. She starts to pull her hand back but her efforts are halted when Lysithea’s grip suddenly tightens, catching her before their touch breaks. 

“Annette,” Lysithea says. Lysithea has said her name plenty of times before, but this tone is not one that Annette is familiar with. 

She knows Lysithea’s annoyance and her excitement and her frustration and even panic, in the case of battles, but this is something softer—something almost breathy—and as ethereal as the tingle one feels during the Warp spell. Annette thinks that it is transferring her, in its own way, to somewhere else entirely. 

Somewhere else in a place where she might be brave enough to lean across the table a little further. 

“Is everything okay?” Annette asks. She reciprocates Lysithea’s grip. 

The corner of Lysithea’s mouth curls upwards in the faintest smile. “Thank you, Annette.”

Annette blinks. She almost pulls her hand away from Lysithea, but the almost uncharacteristic warmth on the other woman’s face gives her pause. She smiles instead—a wobbly, tired thing—and tries to stamp down the desire to be closer. 

“Yeah,” she replies. “Any time.”

Lysithea lets go then, moving to straighten her dress and Annette slowly retreats to her own side of the library table. The papers rustle as Lysithea packs up and the smell of ink permeates the space between them. 

Annette knows that if Lysithea smells like parchment, she herself must smell like that too. That, along with a quiet life of too many nights cooped up with only books as their companions, is something that they share. 

Lysithea doesn’t linger at the table. She collects her things and makes for the entrance of the library, stopping to wait at the door. Annette stumbles after her, cradling her own notebook to her chest. 

When they are shoulder to shoulder, Lysithea bumps their arms together gently before she steps away. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says. Her quiet farewell pierces the quiet of the night’s stillness that has settled over the monastery. 

Annette watches, struck, as Lysithea disappears down the hallway, vanishing out of the torchlight. Her own goodnight catches on her tongue, its whisper fading to nothing as her friend’s silhouette disappears. 


End file.
